Help our healers, please

Hey all, hoping I could get some input. We just recently started on heroics, and I'd like any input to help out our heals, since they are somewhat sub par. I'm off spec healing and am a bit concerned that I'm out healing them on our attempts.

Looking through the logs I can't see anything glaringly wrong with his healer. I'm assuming you're worried about his performance on Heroic Immerseus?

Judging from the logs of your normal fights; he is good at keeping a high uptime on the Mastery: Harmony during those but his uptime is much worse on Heroic Immerseus. These attempts are very short, anywhere from 0:44 to 2:35 so there's not a lot of data to work with. I have a suite of WeakAura 2 auras I can give you to track Harmony better if you'd like.

It seems that Jinthalas (you?) is getting much better throughput with Lifebloom and most of your healing is directed towards Hathe so I'm guessing you're tank healing. This makes me wonder how organized your raid is while avoiding the puddles on the ground. The chaos of staying out of damaging sources while trying to keep the raid in range can make it hard for some to focus on healing. Consider switching roles with your druid healer and seeing how the performances match up then.

Twixen is currently at the 6652 haste breakpoint. I would recommend he either scales that up or down to 3043 or 13163. The 6652 haste breakpoint only gives an extra tick of Wild Growth and Efflorescence, which is weaker than the 3k difference in mastery you lose for it. I find the 13163 haste breakpoint to be the best of all 3; it gives 1 more Rejuv tick, 2 more Wild Growth ticks, and another Tranquility HoT component tick. My recommendation: have him push his gear to hit the 13163 haste cap; even gemming straight +320 Haste Quick Sun's Radiance gems in non-matching sockets to achieve it. There are some druids that find a 3043 haste cap and straight mastery stacking after that to be suitable; but most prefer 13163 haste breakpoint.

Judging from the healing breakdown, Twixen is keeping a good coverage of Efflorescence on the raid. Always have it on at least 3 raid members taking sustained damage or the stack of melee or ranged (I aim for whichever group has more members).

That's all I have for what I can tell from your logs. I do have a couple of suggestions/tips for Heroic Immerseus though.

My raid has every but the boss tank and the tank healer stack on the right side of the large platform in the back. The tank healer and boss tank are on the left. When a puddle comes out, we all move forward as a group. We continue moving as a group forward, then left across the platform towards where the boss tank and healer are. How you move as a group doesn't matter for that strategy, as much as that you have enough space to move without crowding the tank and tank healer before he Splits, and that you all stay stacked.
By staying stacked you allow your healers to utilize aoe heals (namely Efflorescence, Wild Mushroom: Bloom, and Healing Rain), you can pop close-proximity raid CDs such as Anti-Magic Zone or Spirit Link Totem if the Swirl has an unfortunate position and will hit you (allowing you to stand in it with good heals and keep dpsing the boss), and it makes it much much easier for the tank to pick up the adds that spawn as your debuffs wear off or are dispelled. Once the puddles form, you have 1 second to move or you will be ticked on; possibly killing you. It's much easier and cleaner than it sounds once you're accustomed to it; you pick up the rhythm.

Resto Druid specific advice for Immerseus: Spec Incarnation talent for strong healing of the adds during split towards the end when there are a lot. When the adds are flying out to their positions, watch the ground for where the healing ones will land. Position your Wild Mushroom accordingly; preferably where there are two or more. You can bloom the mushroom to heal them and gain a couple stacks of the healing buff quickly, then move onto others near you with Rejuvenation + Genesis, 2-set powered Healing Touch, Nature's Swiftness Healing Touch, and quick Regrowths (or instant with Incarnation). I haven't found Tranquility to work on the adds, so I save that for when people are running back and need heavy healing.
For this fight I also take Nature's Vigil. It provides that 25% extra healing towards the Split adds or can allow you to blanket the raid with Rejuvenations for heavy healing. I have started taking Nature's Vigil over Heart of the Wild for all Heroic fights; I love the short CD, the ability to blanket Rejuvenations for heavy healing, how it strengthens Tranquility and/or Incarnation with LB rolling, etc.

Resto Druid specific advice for in general: Charge your Wild Mushroom before the pull, it won't reset once the fight starts.

That's all I can think of at the moment. You're welcome to add me on BattleTag if you have any questions; Talas#1602.

Looking only at Twixen, since this is the druid forum and druid healing is what I do.

Buffs & uptimes:
- Harmony uptime is overall okay, but drops on movement-intense fights like shamans and Blackfuse. It should be >95% on every fight. Get an addon like WeakAuras to track it.
- Lifebloom uptime is very low. It should be at >95% but averages only just above 60%. That's a lot of time and mana spent reapplying the full stack.
- Clearcasting procs go unused a lot, which explains the problems with keeping Harmony and Lifebloom up. CC procs should generally be spent on Regrowths on the tank to refresh H+LB for free, even if the healing isn't needed. Worry more about buff uptime and less about overhealing.

Cooldown use:
- Definitely the biggest area that needs improvement.
- Specced for Heart of the Wild but didn't use it even once in 11 kills. That's a massive loss in healing potential. Cooldown use is a big part of healing well and requires planning.
- Specced for Incarnation but didn't use that either. It should have been used at least twice on every fight. Could be replaced with the passive Soul of the Forest talent.
- Used Tranquility eight times in eleven kills. It should be used several times per fight. Again, plan it. If nothing else works, have the raid leader assign when to use it.
- Barkskin use is terrible. Ironbark likewise. Both are free, off the GCD and have short cooldowns. They should be used several times per fight each.
- Nature's Swiftness wasn't used at all. Even with 2T16, I still find times to use it even on farm content. Plenty of people died, so it's not a case of saving it for emergencies that don't happen. There were emergencies, NS wasn't used, and then people died because they didn't get healed fast enough.

Spell use:
- Overall good. Nothing major, but some room for improvement.
- Mushroom Bloom use is very inconsistent. It's excellent in one of the logs and has 96% overhealing in the other. The Galakras log is an example of Bloom used impressively well. The Thok log is an example of Bloom used very poorly.
- Regrowth and Swiftmend use is low, which explains why Harmony uptime isn't better. Swiftmend is cheap and should be used more or less on cooldown. Regrowth should be cast whenever Clearcasting is up. Doing so will result in better Lifebloom uptime, which means more Clearcasting procs, which means even more free Regrowths. Don't save it for emergencies: that's what Nature's Swiftness and Sage Mender are for.

Talents and glyphs:
- Logged out in DPS gear, so can't really say anything about gear or reforging.
- Talents are okay. Soul of the Forest is generally a bit better than Incarnation and Nature's Vigil is generally better than Heart of the Wild, but they all have their uses depending on the fight. Ysera's Gift and Displacer Beast are excellent choices. The remaining two are CC and don't really matter.
- Glyphs are okay, except for the glyph of Healing Touch. No one really ever casts Healing Touch enough for it to be useful. Reducing the cooldown on Nature's Swiftness is also rather pointless when you don't ever actually use Nature's Swiftness. Replace it with a Glyph of Regrowth.

That being said, as far as cooldowns go, I'm not surprised about the lack of uses. I hardly ever use raid CDs in normal at this point, if they're doing heroics they've full cleared normal, and really nothing is healing intensive enough to require CDs. I tranq once on Iron Jugg, and there's no other fight aside from Garrosh I can think of where I actually need any CDs at all. I mean, of course it would increase my healing, but it's far from required and I usually only Tranq if I want to spend 5 seconds replying to someone on facebook or something haha. In heroics obviously every cooldown and ability needs to be used, but it's hard to tell from normal honestly.

The thing with normal is, especially when it's on farm as you begin on heroics, people tend to take it less seriously. This causes their healing or DPS to be worse than normal, because they don't really care since you aren't going to wipe anyway. Maybe other people are different, obviously everyone is, but I know from personal experience on any fight that's easy and on farm I tend to not pay much attention unless things go downhill. Or sometimes I just try to do fights in odd ways, I did Norushen a few weeks back with autorun on the entire time, didn't stop to cast Tranq or Regrowth or anything, just to see what it would do to my healing, and it went fine as it always does.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, it would be a lot more beneficial to look at logs from heroic wipes over normal farm, because you can do normal fights with 2 healers doing 100k HPS each, whereas on heroics that won't work (at least not always, anyway) and as such it's very easy to slack off in normal as a healer, since you really don't need to do much once you outgear the content and your DPS knows how to avoid standing in fire. On progression, especially heroics, there's more damage as your group learns the new fights and doesn't pop CDs properly and all that, and so you'll need to actually use all your skills at that point.

That being said, as far as cooldowns go, I'm not surprised about the lack of uses. I hardly ever use raid CDs in normal at this point, if they're doing heroics they've full cleared normal, and really nothing is healing intensive enough to require CDs. I tranq once on Iron Jugg, and there's no other fight aside from Garrosh I can think of where I actually need any CDs at all.

While I agree in principle, it seems to me to be a difference in how you view cooldown use. Aside from Nature's Swiftness, I almost never use cooldown in response to high damage. It's all pre-planned. Incarnation, Nature's Vigil, Heart of the Wild, Tranquility, Ironbark and Barkskin all work best when you use them right before heavy damage starts coming in. It's too late to cast Ironbark when someone is already low, and HoTs use whatever +healing multipliers you had at the time of casting for their whole duration, so you get much better results if you activate Incarnation/Vigil and cast Rejuvenation on everyone than if you cast Rejuvenation on people, realize it's not enough and try to salvage the situation by using a cooldown. Reactive cooldown use isn't going to cut it on a lot of heroic modes.

Of course, I could be wrong and it could just be that the raid group has gotten lazy on normal modes, but personally I still use my cooldown at the same points as I did when the content was hard. It results in a lot of overhealing, but it means we virtually never wipe on farm content. Considering that the logs include a couple of normal mode wipes and no cooldowns were used on those either, I think it's safe to say that cooldown use is an issue.

It's hard to say without seeing more progression logs. Immerseus is unfortunately hard to say much about, especially when the group is still wiping in the first phase (which is by far the hardest part of the fight in terms of coordination, but not particularly demanding to heal).

Thanks for the input. I'll see if I can get them to use some of the suggestions. And for clarification, I was just looking for H Immerseus advice. I put the other logs up to give some sort of comparison to how they heal normal. Also, yes, I'm Jinthalas in the Heroic attempt. I didn't think I should be ahead of our dedicated healers as an offspec healer. Thanks again.

i honestly can't see anything they're doing SUPER badly, the hps seems super low, when we were doing immer i remember doing around 165-175k hps on it every pull, much higher if we wiped 1-3mins in.

your druids rejuv uptime does seem super low, wild growth uptime also seems low, he used regrowth one time in total? used swiftmend once.. in total on some pulls.

make him spec soul of the forest, make him use sw+wg on cd until he gets it, he should be doing around 140k hps, the shaman should be doing around the same, all 3 healers should aim for at least 140k hps, i know it's hard to give up tree form, but it's a pretty terrible talent compared to soul of the forest, the only time i'd ever maybe spec tree is on heroic thok if we lacked cds or something.

just tell the druid to get the 13163 haste, rest into mastery, dispel someone at 5 stacks of the debuff, swiftmend wg on cd in p1 roll rejuv on at least 4-5 people (mana isn't an issue on this fight, you should get full mana every puddle phase so you can freely spam your mana bar in p1) if he can't keep track of shroom don't even bother, i've not used bloom on the last 7 immer kills, it's not really a big deal, rejuv every blue puddle on your side and genesis to slow them down, then top them all while standing in melee range.

it seems like you're wiping to just a lack of output, people are dying to very healable damage.

i honestly can't see anything they're doing SUPER badly, the hps seems super low, when we were doing immer i remember doing around 165-175k hps on it every pull, much higher if we wiped 1-3mins in.

your druids rejuv uptime does seem super low, wild growth uptime also seems low, he used regrowth one time in total? used swiftmend once.. in total on some pulls.

make him spec soul of the forest, make him use sw+wg on cd until he gets it, he should be doing around 140k hps, the shaman should be doing around the same, all 3 healers should aim for at least 140k hps, i know it's hard to give up tree form, but it's a pretty terrible talent compared to soul of the forest, the only time i'd ever maybe spec tree is on heroic thok if we lacked cds or something.

just tell the druid to get the 13163 haste, rest into mastery, dispel someone at 5 stacks of the debuff, swiftmend wg on cd in p1 roll rejuv on at least 4-5 people (mana isn't an issue on this fight, you should get full mana every puddle phase so you can freely spam your mana bar in p1) if he can't keep track of shroom don't even bother, i've not used bloom on the last 7 immer kills, it's not really a big deal, rejuv every blue puddle on your side and genesis to slow them down, then top them all while standing in melee range.

it seems like you're wiping to just a lack of output, people are dying to very healable damage.

Not using bloom on immerseus? What is this blasphemy....you can drop your mushroom, stand in between two+, get them instantly topped off and then displacer to another pack. You can rejuv rejuv genesis on a lot more targets that way. When I was in 10 man I would constantly get 6 or more after the first submersion while the paladin rarely got more than 3. 175k hps is also WAY too high, especially if it was every single pull. That leads me to believe your raid was standing in puddles and getting higher than recommended stacks, forcing you to cast more, which is great for your epeen but not really great advice for people to improve.

As for getting the 13163 bp with 13500 spirit, he'd give up 13% mastery. I would recommend getting a few more haste pieces before making the transition to the higher break point, though I would recommend dropping to 3043 haste until you get to that point. You also don't need to SW + WG on cd. There is actually very little raid damage outside of the first two submersion phases. I would only do that once the first puddles come out and when the adds are being killed. After that, just focus tank and get your mushroom fully stocked.

Originally Posted by Socialhealer

judging 25man raiding by LFR standards saying it requires no coordination, is like saying 5mans require cheese sandwiches because i like turtles.

Not using bloom on immerseus? What is this blasphemy....you can drop your mushroom, stand in between two+, get them instantly topped off and then displacer to another pack. You can rejuv rejuv genesis on a lot more targets that way. When I was in 10 man I would constantly get 6 or more after the first submersion while the paladin rarely got more than 3. 175k hps is also WAY too high, especially if it was every single pull. That leads me to believe your raid was standing in puddles and getting higher than recommended stacks, forcing you to cast more, which is great for your epeen but not really great advice for people to improve.

As for getting the 13163 bp with 13500 spirit, he'd give up 13% mastery. I would recommend getting a few more haste pieces before making the transition to the higher break point, though I would recommend dropping to 3043 haste until you get to that point. You also don't need to SW + WG on cd. There is actually very little raid damage outside of the first two submersion phases. I would only do that once the first puddles come out and when the adds are being killed. After that, just focus tank and get your mushroom fully stocked.

using bloom is the best option if you're progressing, i've not needed to use bloom for as long as i can remember, i can top 4-6 puddles off with genesis rejuv on average.

also i couldn't do under 175k hps if i tried on p1 immer, i don't see how you'd do any lower if you're spamming rejuv/wg like you should be in p1.

i also meant use sm/wg on cd in p1, obviously not the puddle phases.

as for the haste break point, yeahh he'd probably need slightly better gear for it, but it's still a goal he should aim for.

using bloom is the best option if you're progressing, i've not needed to use bloom for as long as i can remember, i can top 4-6 puddles off with genesis rejuv on average.

also i couldn't do under 175k hps if i tried on p1 immer, i don't see how you'd do any lower if you're spamming rejuv/wg like you should be in p1.

i also meant use sm/wg on cd in p1, obviously not the puddle phases.

as for the haste break point, yeahh he'd probably need slightly better gear for it, but it's still a goal he should aim for.

On almost all of my logs ever since we killed him I've never pulled over 150k even two healing it (unless something really stupid happened like the 2nd healer died in the first p1 for whatever reason) and healing has never been a problem >_> as I said, your raid probably stands in more crap than I do. And sure you don't need to use bloom, but we're trying to help this guy get better. Using mushroom bloom is THE best way to top off multiple oozes quickly which allows you to heal up more of them. I'm not saying that asil personally needs to use it, but in general, mushroom bloom is the way to go 99% of the time.

Originally Posted by Socialhealer

judging 25man raiding by LFR standards saying it requires no coordination, is like saying 5mans require cheese sandwiches because i like turtles.

i agree he should be using bloom, but if he can't keep track of it (idk if he can or can't) it might not even be worth bothering if he's running out of range of said shroom and losing the stacks :/

If he can't keep track of his mushroom, he doesn't belong in heroics. It's the single best ability resto druids have for dealing with the adds, and if you can't handle that you're not going to be able to handle the fight at all. It's not that hard to move the mushroom when your raid moves.

But looking at the logs, they're not even getting that far so that's not the issue. They're dying to Swirls, non-tanks getting hit by Corrosive Blast, getting overrun by adds, stacking the debuff too high and standing in puddles. None of those can be fixed by healing more. In fact, I didn't see any attempt where lack of healing was the cause of the wipe. The healers will have to step up their game if they want to kill any other boss, though. Immerseus is not the easiest heroic fight in SoO, but it is the easiest one to heal.

It looks like your group is all spread out which makes adds spawn anywhere. That's what I think according to their healing from efflorescence which seems a bit low. Also, your team seems to lack some dispells. One last thing, tell them to pop their mushrooms on blue adds and make sure they are stacked on the add. They will gain a buff greatly increasing their healing done and giving them some mana back. This buff can stack multiple time (just like the DPS one) and has a very short duration. They can easily use it to full their mushroom again while immersieus reforms. On your logs I see no such buff gained on both of your druids.